johnchinjew

Hey all! I've added a number of features this past week. Tell me what you think.

1. You can now react with emojis at the end of every round.

2. Someone found a great word? You can now double-tap to give them a like.

3. You can now see the first letter of the "word to beat" in real time.

Other improvements: Added a more detailed "How to play?". Addressed the profanity issues. Improved the word list quality. Fixed unexpected "Word already used" errors.

Thanks! Thinking of adding a "double tap to like" feature next to allow players to give kudos for clever words.

Good point, I've removed all the proper nouns now.

Thanks for checking it out. I've added a proper "How to play?" section now. Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry. Fixed that now!

Could it be that your device's clock is skewed?

There's a timer at the top! Perhaps a warning SFX and and some animation is in order. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for playing! Yeah you're right, rules need to be spelled out a bit better.

I'd also like to expand it to work with other alphabetic languages too.

Thanks for checking it out! A single-player/offline mode does sound fun too. I do think I will end up adding support for a number of variations and modes.

Yes, it's intentional to allow words that don't use all the letters. It can be very tricky to think of a panagram every time (word that has all 7 letters used at least once). Hence, we don't require every submission to be a panagram. I'll work on making the instructions clearer!

There is a bit of an interesting related sharp edge here. Sometimes the longest word for a given set of letters actually does NOT use all the letters! I've thought of a number of approaches to address this tension, but, opted to keep scoring dead simple in the end. I may experiment in the future on this topic though.

Really great points, thanks for commenting.

One nuance: if you show others' submissions right away, the game turns into a "race" where speed matters a lot more. That could be fun too (a different game mode?). I might think about showing something like "Opponent X found A _ _ _ _" or "Opponent X found a 5 letter word".

I'm using Phoenix LiveView + PubSub to keep everyone's browser in sync.

Sorry folks, something broke! Looking into it and will post here with updates.

UPDATE: Looks like Railway is having problems. Trying to find mitigation on my side.

Good idea. And thanks for checking it out!

I think I know what went wrong. Right now, even unscored words are not allowed to be reused. Will post a quick fix. Thanks for the precise bug report!

Adding chat is a good idea, thanks for the input. Thanks for checking it out!

I've been working on a simple multiplayer word game: http://alphabetsoup.club

It's a bit like NYT Spelling Bee, except it's multiplayer and only your best (longest) word counts toward your score. So, instead of trying to find as many words as possible, the game is more about finding one unusually good word.

Funny timing, I just made my first Show HN post for this a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235347

If we're trying to outline a future for assertions, I think it would help to situate them among the other mechanisms we have for ensuring correctness and explain where assertions have the right tradeoffs. For example, what unique need does a production assertion API satisfy that a normal conditional throw does not? Are there cases where production assertions are still necessary even when invariants are established through type constructors?